The Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014 was divided, one half awarded to John
O'Keefe, the other half jointly to May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser
"for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in
the brain".

The Nobel
Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award The 2014 Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine with one half to John O´Keefe and the other
half jointly to May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser for their discoveries of
cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain

How do we
know where we are? How can we find the way from one place to another? And how
can we store this information in such a way that we can immediately find the
way the next time we trace the same path? This year´s Nobel Laureates have
discovered a positioning system, an "inner GPS" in the brain that
makes it possible to orient ourselves in space, demonstrating a cellular basis
for higher cognitive function.

In 1971,
John O´Keefe discovered the first component of this positioning system. He
found that a type of nerve cell in an area of the brain called the hippocampus
that was always activated when a rat was at a certain place in a room. Other
nerve cells were activated when the rat was at other places. O´Keefe concluded
that these "place cells" formed a map of the room.

More than
three decades later, in 2005, May-Britt and Edvard Moser discovered another key
component of the brain's positioning system. They identified another type of
nerve cell, which they called "grid cells," that generate a
coordinate system and allow for precise positioning and pathfinding. Their
subsequent research showed how place and grid cells make it possible to
determine position and to navigate.

The
discoveries of John O´Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser have solved a
problem that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries -- how does
the brain create a map of the space surrounding us and how can we navigate our
way through a complex environment?

How do we
environment?

The sense
of place and the ability to navigate are fundamental to our existence. The
sense of place gives a perception of position in the environment. During
navigation, it is interlinked with a sense of distance that is based on motion
and knowledge of previous positions.Questions about place and navigation have engaged
philosophers and scientists for a long time. More than 200 years ago, the
German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that some mental abilities exist as a
priori knowledge, independent of experience. He considered the concept of space
as an inbuilt principle of the mind, one through which the world is and must be
perceived. With the advent of behavioural psychology in the mid-20th century,
these questions could be addressed experimentally. When Edward Tolman examined
rats moving through labyrinths, he found that they could learn how to navigate,
and proposed that a "cognitive map" formed in the brain allowed them
to find their way. But questions still lingered -- how would such a map be
represented in the brain?

John
O´Keefe and the place in space

John O´Keefe
was fascinated by the problem of how the brain controls behaviour and decided,
in the late 1960s, to attack this question with neurophysiological methods.
When recording signals from individual nerve cells in a part of the brain
called the hippocampus, in rats moving freely in a room, O'Keefe discovered
that certain nerve cells were activated when the animal assumed a particular
place in the environment. He could demonstrate that these "place
cells" were not merely registering visual input, but were building up an
inner map of the environment. O'Keefe concluded that the hippocampus generates
numerous maps, represented by the collective activity of place cells that are
activated in different environments. Therefore, the memory of an eexperience
our nvironment can be stored as a specific combination of place cell activities
in the hippocampus.

May-Britt
and Edvard Moser find the coordinates

May-Britt
and Edvard Moser were mapping the connections to the hippocampus in rats moving
in a room when they discovered an astonishing pattern of activity in a nearby
part of the brain called the entorhinal cortex. Here, certain cells were
activated when the rat passed multiple locations arranged in a hexagonal grid.
Each of these cells was activated in a unique spatial pattern and collectively
these "grid cells" constitute a coordinate system that allows for
spatial navigation. Together with other cells of the entorhinal cortex that
recognize the direction of the head and the border of the room, they form
circuits with the place cells in the hippocampus. This circuitry constitutes a
comprehensive positioning system, an inner GPS, in the brain.A place for maps
in the human brainRecent investigations with brain imaging techniques, as well
as studies of patients undergoing neurosurgery, have provided evidence that
place and grid cells exist also in humans. In patients with Alzheimer´s
disease, the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex are frequently affected at an
early stage, and these individuals often lose their way and cannot recognize
the environment. Knowledge about the brain´s positioning system may, therefore,
help us understand the mechanism underpinning the devastating spatial memory
loss that affects people with this disease.

The
discovery of the brain's positioning system represents a paradigm shift in our
understanding of how ensembles of specialized cells work together to execute
higher cognitive functions. It has opened new avenues for understanding other
cognitive processes, such as memory, thinking and planning

The Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for
2014 to

This
year’s Nobel Laureates are rewarded for having invented a new energy-efficient
and environment-friendly light source – the blue light-emitting diode (LED). In
the spirit of Alfred Nobel the Prize rewards an invention of greatest benefit
to mankind; using blue LEDs, white light can be created in a new way. With the
advent of LED lamps we now have more long-lasting and more efficient
alternatives to older light sources.

When
Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura produced bright blue light
beams from their semi-conductors in the early 1990s, they triggered a
funda-mental transformation of lighting technology. Red and green diodes had
been around for a long time but without blue light, white lamps could not be
created. Despite considerable efforts, both in the scientific community and in
industry, the blue LED had remained a challenge for three decades.

They
succeeded where everyone else had failed. Akasaki worked together with Amano at
the University of Nagoya, while Nakamura was employed at Nichia Chemicals, a
small company in Tokushima. Their inventions were revolutionary. Incandescent
light bulbs lit the 20th century; the 21st century will be lit by LED lamps.

White LED
lamps emit a bright white light, are long-lasting and energy-efficient. They
are constantly improved, getting more efficient with higher luminous flux
(measured in lumen) per unit electrical input power (measured in watt). The
most recent record is just over 300 lm/W, which can be compared to 16 for
regular light bulbs and close to 70 for fluorescent lamps. As about one fourth
of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs
contribute to saving the Earth’s resources. Materials consumption is also
diminished as LEDs last up to 100,000 hours, compared to 1,000 for incandescent
bulbs and 10,000 hours for fluorescent lights.

The LED
lamp holds great promise for increasing the quality of life for over 1.5
billion people around the world who lack access to electricity grids: due to
low power requirements it can be powered by cheap local solar power.

The
invention of the blue LED is just twenty years old, but it has already
contributed to create white light in an entirely new manner to the benefit of
us all.

The Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
for 2014 to

For a
long time optical microscopy was held back by a presumed limitation: that it
would never obtain a better resolution than half the wavelength of light.
Helped by fluorescent molecules the Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 2014
ingeniously circumvented this limitation. Their ground-breaking work has
brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension.

In what
has become known as nanoscopy, scientists visualize the pathways of individual
molecules inside living cells. They can see how molecules create synapses
between nerve cells in the brain; they can track proteins involved in
Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases as they aggregate; they
follow individual proteins in fertilized eggs as these divide into embryos.

It was
all but obvious that scientists should ever be able to study living cells in
the tiniest molecular detail. In 1873, the microscopist Ernst Abbe stipulated a
physical limit for the maximum resolution of traditional optical microscopy: it
could never become better than 0.2 micrometres. Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and
William E. Moerner are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014 for having
bypassed this limit. Due to their achievements the optical microscope can now
peer into the nanoworld.

Two
separate principles are rewarded. One enables the method stimulated emission
depletion (STED) microscopy, developed by Stefan Hell in 2000. Two laser beams
are utilized; one stimulates fluorescent molecules to glow, another cancels out
all fluorescence except for that in a nanometre-sized volume. Scanning over the
sample, nanometre for nanometre, yields an image with a resolution better than
Abbe’s stipulated limit.

Eric
Betzig and William Moerner, working separately, laid the foundation for the
second method, single-molecule microscopy. The method relies upon the
possibility to turn the fluorescence of individual molecules on and off.
Scientists image the same area multiple times, letting just a few interspersed
molecules glow each time. Superimposing these images yields a dense super-image
resolved at the nanolevel. In 2006 Eric Betzig utilized this method for the
first time.

Today,
nanoscopy is used world-wide and new knowledge of greatest benefit to mankind
is produced on a daily basis.

The Nobel
Prize in Literature 2014:

Patrick
Modiano

Prize
share: 1/1

The Nobel
Prize in Literature 2014 was awarded to Patrick Modiano "for the art of
memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and
uncovered the life-world of the occupation".

Patrick
Modiano (born 30 July 1945) is a French novelist. He won the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 2014, having previously won the Austrian State Prize for
European Literature in 2012 and the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca from the
Institut de France for his lifetime achievement in 2010. His other awards
include the Prix Goncourt in 1978 for his novel Rue des boutiques obscures and
the Grand prix du roman de l'Académie française in 1972 for Les Boulevards de
ceinture.

Writing:

Modiano's
novels all delve into the puzzle of identity, of how one can track evidence of
one's existence through the traces of the past. Obsessed with the troubled and
shameful period of the Occupation—during which his father had allegedly engaged
in some shady dealings—Modiano returns to this theme in all of his novels, book
after book building a remarkably homogeneous work. "After each novel, I
have the impression that I have cleared it all away," he says. "But I
know I'll come back over and over again to tiny details, little things that are
part of what I am. In the end, we are all determined by the place and the time
in which we were born." He writes constantly about the city of Paris,
describing the evolution of its streets, its habits and its people

Book
:Honeymoon:

Jean B.,
the narrator of Patrick Modiano's Honeymoon, is submerged in a world where day
and night, past and present, have no demarcations. Having spent his adult life
making documentary films about lost explorers, Jean suddenly decides to abandon
his wife and career, and takes what seems to be a journey to nowhere. He
pretends to fly to Rio to make another film, but instead returns to his own
Parisian suburb to spend his solitary days recounting or imagining the lives of
Ingrid and Rigaud, a refugee couple he had met twenty years before, and in whom
he had recognized a spiritual anomie that seemed to reflect and justify his
own. Little by little, their story takes on more reality than Jean's daily
existence, as his excavation of the past slowly becomes an all-encompassing
obsession.

Book : Out
of the Dark

Patrick
Modiano, the author of more than twenty books, is one of France?s most admired
contemporary novelists. Out of the Dark is a moody, expertly rendered tale of a
love affair between two drifters.

The
narrator,¯writing in 1995, looks back thirty years to a time when, having
abandoned his studies and selling off old art books to get by, he comes to
know Van Bever and Jacqueline, a young,
enigmatic couple who seem to live off roulette winnings. He falls in love with
Jacqueline; they run off to England together, where they share a few sad,
aimless months, until one day she disappears. Fifteen years later, in Paris,
they meet again, a reunion that only recalls the haunting inaccessibility of
the past: they spend a few hours together, and the next day, Jacqueline, now
married, disappears once again. Almost fifteen years after that, he sees her
yet again, this time from a distance he chooses not to bridge. A profoundly
affecting novel, Out of the Dark is poignant, strange, delicate, melancholy,
and sadly hilarious

The Nobel
Peace Prize for 2014

The
Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2014 is to
be awarded to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala
Yousafzay for their struggle against the suppression of children and young
people and for the right of all children to education. Children must go to school and not be
financially exploited. In the poor
countries of the world, 60% of the present population is under 25 years of
age. It is a prerequisite for peaceful
global development that the rights of children and young people be
respected. In conflict-ridden areas in
particular, the violation of children leads to the continuation of violence
from generation to generation.

Kailash
Satyarthi (born 11 January 1954) is an Indian children's rights
activist and a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.He founded the Bachpan Bachao Andolan
— or Save the Childhood Movement — in 1980 and has acted to protect the rights
of 80,000 childrenShowing great personal courage, Kailash
Satyarthi, maintaining Gandhi’s tradition, has headed various forms of
protests and demonstrations, all peaceful, focusing on the grave exploitation
of children for financial gain. He has
also contributed to the development of important international conventions on
children’s rights.

Despite
her youth, Malala Yousafzay has already fought for several
years for the right of girls to education, and has shown by example that
children and young people, too, can contribute to improving their own
situations. This she has done under the most
dangerous circumstances. Through her
heroic struggle she has become a leading spokesperson for girls’ rights to
education.On the afternoon of 9 October 2012, Malala boarded her school bus in
the northwest Pakistani district of Swat. A gunman asked for Malala by name,
then pointed a Colt 45 at her and fired three shots. One bullet hit the left
side of Malala's forehead, traveled under her skin the length of her face and
then into her shoulder

The Nobel
Committee regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian
and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against
extremism. Many other individuals and
institutions in the international community have also contributed. It has been calculated that there are 168
million child labourers around the world today.
In 2000 the figure was 78 million higher. The world has come closer to the goal of
eliminating child labour.

The
struggle against suppression and for the rights of children and adolescents
contributes to the realization of the “fraternity between nations” that Alfred
Nobel mentions in his will as one of the criteria for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The
Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2014

The
Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2014 was
awarded to Jean Tirole "for his analysis of market
power and regulation".

Jean
Tirole

Born: 9
August 1953 in France (3rd Laureate in Economic Sciences born in France)

Workplace:
Director of Toulouse School of Economics

The
science of taming powerful firms:

Many
industries are dominated by a small number of large firms or a single monopoly.
Left unregulated, such markets often produce socially undesirable results –
prices higher than those motivated by costs, or unproductive firms that survive
by blocking the entry of new and more productive ones.

From the
mid-1980s and onwards, Jean Tirole has breathed new life into research on such
market failures. His analysis of firms with market power provides a unified
theory with a strong bearing on central policy questions: how should the
government deal with mergers or cartels, and how should it regulate monopolies?

Before
Tirole, researchers and policymakers sought general principles for all
industries. They advocated simple policy rules, such as capping prices for
monopolists and prohibiting cooperation between competitors, while permitting
cooperation between firms with different positions in the value chain. Tirole
showed theoretically that such rules may work well in certain conditions, but
do more harm than good in others. Price caps can provide dominant firms with
strong motives to reduce costs – a good thing for society – but may also permit
excessive profits – a bad thing for society. Cooperation on price setting
within a market is usually harmful, but cooperation regarding patent pools can
benefit everyone. The merger of a firm and its supplier may encourage
innovation, but may also distort competition.

The best
regulation or competition policy should therefore be carefully adapted to every
industry’s specific conditions. In a series of articles and books, Jean Tirole
has presented a general framework for designing such policies and applied it to
a number of industries, ranging from telecommunications to banking. Drawing on
these new insights, governments can better encourage powerful firms to become
more productive and, at the same time, prevent them from harming competitors
and customers.